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All of us carry the imprint of our ancestors, their wisdom as well as their pain. It's part of being in the human family. For years I ran from this truth. I felt the willies when I thought of the weirdness in my lineage and didn’t want anything to do with it. Now I am learning to face my ancestors—and by this I mean all who have gone before me, like my brother and sister who died young. I am learning to call them by name, honor them, and even ask them to be my allies.

A beloved teacher of mine in the world of Jungian psychology once told me this dream:

I am in an unrelenting storm of whirling energy. Everyone is panicking, running about helter-skelter, desperately seeking shelter or escape. Every so often, a bolt of blue electricity tears through the crowd like a buzz saw, threatening anyone in its path. In the midst of the pandemonium I stop to notice that this spiral nightmare is like a crazy amusement park ride, and that everyone has a seat. I quickly find my own and climb into it. No sooner do I click into my place then everyone around me stops running and finds their own seat. Things slow down. The blue bolts of lightning soften and stop and calm takes over.

Last night, I traveled backwards across the dateline, having slipped behind the exotic curtain of Japanese culture for two eye-opening weeks. The impetus for my journey was an invitation from the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research to participate in an interfaith roundtable on the topic of Warrior and Pacifist Traditions in the Three Abrahamic Religions and Buddhism.

The ancestral field has its own magical magnetic pull on us. It compels us toward it like a riptide with both the unworked trauma and the accrued wisdom of the past. So you might find yourself doing things that make no sense at all in the context of your own life, be drawn to certain pass times or people, or have a hidden compulsion that riddles your health…until you discover that you are following the pull of an earlier family member, an ancestor's unfulfilled dream, or undigested tragedy.

Despite the astonishing efforts I made to deny them, my ancestors were incontestably alive within me—with all their foibles and fears. Just as my grandparents' values had coiled down the twisted ladder of their DNA to me—love of the written word, Jewish education, and heavy food—so had the pain and injury of being a Jew been transmitted to me.

It took me decades to understand my family's tragedies: a brother's suicide, a sister's psychosis, the callous cutting of ties between parents and siblings, between siblings and each other. What made us so volatile, so unloving?

Throughout the Zohar we have this profound and radical idea: that God—though infinite, the totality of consciousness and more—is not quite whole. One main reason: God is masculine seeking His feminine, feeling side. You might say this is a projection. Or you might say that we humans reflect the Creator's own cosmic imbalance.

Understanding Kabbalah in the light of depth psychology has been a lifetime pursuit for me. Both draw upon a simple premise that beyond the physical reality shown to us by our five senses there exist unseen dimensions, or force fields that exert their gravitational pulls upon us.